Zoom in to check out all the flames shooting out of North Dakota; pan out and watch orange lights shimmer across the Middle East and Russia. A toggle bar on the right lets you see what happens in a single night or a whole month.

In North Dakota alone they burn off enough natural gas every day to heat 100,000 homes and globally the practice adds as much CO2 to the atmosphere every year as 77 million automobiles.

It’s kind of beautiful … if it weren’t so ominous.

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